


Reckless Precision

by bodtlings



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Art AU, M/M, Photographer Marco, Photography AU, art student jean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-09
Updated: 2015-06-09
Packaged: 2018-04-03 16:54:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4108144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bodtlings/pseuds/bodtlings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marco admires how he paints and how he loses himself in the motion. He'd love to just stare at him and not get caught, but then again, things don't always happen the way you want them to.</p><p>Sometimes, though, it's okay, because better things are on the horizon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reckless Precision

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for the prompt [kai](https://twitter.com/marcobutton)!

He paints with reckless precision.

He paints like he knows what he’s doing, knows the rubber band that is his imagination, ever expanding, stretching, twisting and looping, but never breaking and never constricting.

He paints with a purpose, only the purpose is to have no purpose at all.

Marco doesn’t think he could do justice to Jean’s splatter soul across a canvas captured something as simple as a photograph, but he doesn’t think it’d hurt to try.

It’s easy at first - Marco feels the weight of his padded camera strap around his neck like a reassurance and the crystal clear view he has of Jean as if his eyes were the camera themselves. His fingers itch to bring the lens up, to turn the focus just so and capture a piece of this subdued roaring talent that no one else seems to notice when that paintbrush hits the canvas.

Marco can’t do it, though. Not that very second, because he feels as if he were to rip his eyes away from watching this man paint, he’d lose the essence of what it means to create art, like he’d miss something so vital it’d be taboo.

So he waits, day after day after day to try and find the right opportunity, the right angle and the right reason to take a picture of something so purely tainted, only waiting turns into falling.

If there’s a better way to describe the falling better than a carpet being ripped from underneath his feet, Marco would use it. But for right now, he’s much too busy tripping over his untied shoelaces into the organized mess that is everything the abstract project Jean’s working on.

Marco thinks he should probably stop being a creep and staring through the art room window. Going in would be a lot less suspicious, but he’d rather not stammer over his words like his footsteps tend to do whenever he wanders into the art department and pass the room he knows is always occupied.

Today seems to be a good a day as any, because now he has no reason to be hiding if he’s been found out.

Jean picks his head up, slouched over his paints and tattered jeans and a messy display of what he hopes to convey, and peers through the scratched plastic window of the art room door. Marco just ducks, dropping his backpack to the floor in a fabric heap, one hand outstretched and the other bracing himself against the wall. His heart violently pounds against his ribcage and shit he’s been caught, _shit_.

He hears shuffling. The slam of Jean’s art box. Swearing as a paintbrush rattles against the linoleum. The metallic protest of chair legs scraping as it’s pushed back.

Footsteps.

The door opens, and Jean Kirschtein is greeted by the sight of a six-foot man covered in freckles, crouching in fear with a camera slung around his neck and sprawled across the floor.

Jean’s eyebrows shoot as far up as Marco’s blood pressure level, and he asks, “Can I help you…?”

Marco opens his mouth, very keen on saying he just tripped and he’s alright he’ll just crawl back into his dark room down the hall, it’s okay!

But that’s not what he says. Instead, he shuffles his camera, stands up, and sets his shoulders in some ungodly determination he’s only just found hiding in some secret crevice of his bones.

“I want to take a picture of you.”

Of all the things he could have said, that Jean was probably expecting, that was certainly not on the list, and both men stare at the other in silence so thick you could practically see it.

“Uhm, that’s not really - I really think you’re pr - no, let me start over. I -”

“Okay.”

Marco’s fingers instinctively hold on to the camera a little bit tighter, pulling it to his chest a little bit closer, as if he wants to shield it away from prying and unworthy gazes.

“Uhm, but I - and you - you don’t even know me.”

“Sure I do. You’re...Bodt, right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s me.”

Jean crosses his ankles and leans against the door frame, a bit of undried green paint smearing across his forearm as folds his arms together. “I’ve seen your photographs all over the building, in those showcases. I really liked the medical montage you put together, that was really new. Never seen somethin’ like that before.”

“Oh…” Marco fiddles with with his strap and bites his lip. “Thanks.”

Jean abruptly turns around and settles back into his chair, picking up his paintbrush and muttering something about damn bamboo brushes and their clattering noises being so damn annoying.

Marco is left to awkwardly stand in the doorway, staring after a paint-sprinkled mystery he didn’t really mean to stumble upon.

Jean’s dipping his brush in what Marco makes out to be a neon purple acrylic dab of paint straight from the tube, and before he lets his energy flow or release his chakra or whatever Marco thinks he needs to do to be as amazing as he is, Jean looks to the doorway and raises a blue-stained eyebrow. “You just gonna stand there or come in?”

“Oh! Yeah. I am. Definitely coming in. Right now.”

Marco tentatively takes one step into the room and immediately notices the drastic changes and the atmosphere the room holds. As opposed to his darkroom and photography lab, it’s new..

It’s bright, brighter than he could see through the door’s keyed window; all the blinds are up and the windows open to allow a warm breeze to pass through. High ceilings make it bigger, more inviting, and as if the light wasn’t enough, it’s _colorful_.

There’s just color _everywhere_. The furniture and every appliance was stark white a long time ago, but luminescent pigment covers every surface it could possibly reach. Dried smears of the brightest of every hue Marco’s seen before are on walls, tables, chairs, paint utensils, wooden canvases, window sills - even some stray drips of yellow and red cling to the ceiling in time-frozen drips.

It was warm, almost homey, for being a room in an academic building. It’s somewhere you gravitate towards, feel completely at ease in. It was everything Marco wasn’t used to.

Marco was always fond of the dark space in the small photography studio the university provided him with; he became used to and started to enjoy the soft red glow of his lamp, and it felt more private, more intimate to him when developing a photograph he was so proud of.

But now, seeing life displayed across a room in bright hues and happy elements from a man who seemed exactly the opposite, he begins to wonder if he’ll ever find comfort in such a color-less room again.

 

* * *

 

Jean paints, and when he paints, it is unlike anything Marco has previously witnessed.

Worlds don’t stop and time doesn’t stand still and no heartbeats are the loudest sounds in the room. The world does its normal rotation, Marco can hear the drum of the central air in the building through the thin walls, and the clock keeps ticking.

But Jean paints, and it’s not just putting paint to a canvas and calling it art; he puts himself in his paintbrush and pushes everything he wants through the paint to soak in the portrait. His face relaxes, his shoulders lose their tension and his posture curls over his palette, focused and blocking everything that’s labeled as distracting.

Marco almost forgets that he wants to photograph him because he’s so engrossed, so pulled in by the magnetism that is a paintbrush and a paint-splattered enigma.

He sets up the settings on his camera, fixes with some of the focus and the shades in the room (Jean says he doesn’t mind), and snaps picture after picture.

The room is quiet, save for the clicks of Marco’s Nikon and the soft strokes of Jean’s brush, and it is serenity incarnate.

 

* * *

 

_It is with great honor and pride that we present this year’s gallery achievement award to Marco Bodt, for his outstanding “Representation of the Soul” project through the medium of photography. Marco has captured the essence of the human soul with his photo gallery, featuring the works and appearance of Jean Kirschtein, an Honors student in the university’s art department._

_Congratulations again, and we wish you all the best of luck on your future endeavors!_

 

 


End file.
